


Preludes

by Senri



Category: Naruto
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-23
Updated: 2011-08-23
Packaged: 2017-10-22 23:43:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/243881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Senri/pseuds/Senri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kakuzu/Madara, with the first Hokage dying nearby.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Preludes

Crows are circling. Crows, tossed like flecks of ash on the breeze, giving rough voice to their woes, perching on the bodies of men dead and dying, their bills black and knife-sharp, pulling at rended flesh, unbroken skin, the tender areas, the eyes, at men and women alike. The whole field stinks like a charnel-house. There are fallen shinobi as young as thirteen years old, limbs locked with rigor mortis already, pale innocent-looking faces turned up towards the wan blue sky.

This is nothing new to Kakuzu. It should be nothing new to any shinobi - anyone who's been in the business for more than a year or two, really. Once accepts the possibility of death when they accept the forehead protector and wrap it round neck or arm or waist. It should not come as a surprise.

The crows, in a way, do. What with the man who did so much slaughtering today - he would more have expected hawks.

There's still flames licking up across crooked snags of the land. Not much. It's dying, now--the fire. Feasting on the last brittle grass, the last of the great trees called to life in this place. The air is thick. Looking up, Kakuzu notes the color of the sky. It must be morning, by now. Maybe even close to noon. But it looks like evening. Everything is red, bronzed and blackened by ash. The sun is a pale, unblinking eye very high above the valley.

The birds are loud. He passes through a dozen or more of them tearing into a charred mass on the ground, and startles them up into brief indignant flight. Up close, they're lusterless things. There isn't enough light to make their feathers shine, and so when they scatter to the air they look like dark tatters. Shreds of souls. A collective, ragged rise and fall. Their wings beat. They land back down as soon as he's past, shrieking and cackling.

Crows. They are beautiful, in a way, and there are hundreds of them. It's good that they are not summons, he thinks; else he might be obliged to start killing them, especially if they came after him.

As it is, they part before him like black, sticky waters - like tar. He moves carefully and silently, but swiftly. He is searching. Looking for something. Someone.

He finds Madara down by the river. Down by the low, slow river, sliding greasily through its bed. The summer has been long and hot; there's not much water there, not really. Rocks that are usually slick with algae are dun and dry under the merciless sun, and Madara is in the middle of it all, shirt and armor removed, up to his thighs in ash-thick water, scrubbing at his wild hair, his tallow-pale scarred skin, with a handful of sand. Kakuzu pauses at the bank and sighs. This is his leader - his employer. This madman, half-naked with the battleground not secured, water running down his skin and soaking his coarse dark hair.

The Lord Uchiha spots him immediately, of course. He turns to Kakuzu and gives him the usual grin only more so. The usual cracked-mirror crazy grin. "Kakuzu!" he shouts, and his voice is glad and mad. He flounders forward through the water, slopping ash-smeared waves every which way. "Look who it is! I almost thought they'd got you for a while!"

"It's not so easy as that," Kakuzu answers. He plans to live for a good long while, yet. Madara knows this. The grin twitches wider--hungry, amused.

"You never disappoint me." He gets to the bank and laughs, a kind of crack and gasp of a sound like the call of a carrion bird. A dry, melancholy, gleeful rasp from high in his chest. Kakuzu steps back as the man puts his hands on his knees and shakes his head, sending his hair whipping around and water droplets everywhere. When he straightens back up, he drags his fingers over his scalp. Slicks the black hair back for just a moment, so that his face is totally unhidden. His chin is sharp. His lips are dark, his mouth set broadly. There are white scars on his cheeks--the old, very faded kind, that all shinobi who grow up learning to weird sharp blades and pins have.

"You're bleeding," Kakuzu remarks.

"I am," he agrees.

"How does it feel?" Kakuzu asks, and Madara sighs, letting his hair fall around his face again. It is thick with water, soaked right through, as black and lusterless as the crow feathers, as black as the satin tassels on his formal robes. His pinwheel eyes are red and alive, whirling, whirling; Kakuzu's gaze glances across them and away. He has been snared a few times by those garnet-red amazing eyes, and found himself embroiled in furious, elaborate, churning illusions; but he does not think he is this right now. Not this time. Soon enough, of course, he will probably see one way or another - Madara, he thinks, revels in showing himself to Kakuzu, revels in being caught in the webwork of his elaborate games and tricks. The man is as mad as a cat under the moon. But this time, perhaps, the day feels illusitory enough.

Madara tears his fingers through his hair. Water droplets spray every whichaway; one of them hits Kakuzu in the cheek, and follows the line of his face down to the corner of his mouth. He watches Madara fixate on that bead of water, where it catches and trembles in the stitched-up seam on his face.

He stands his ground as the man steps forward, but leans back just the smallest bit when Madara reaches toward him. Just enough to say, without words, what he thinks of the gesture. He is in no mood. He's fought through most of the night. He doesn't want his face touched.

"I don't know," Madara smacks his hand down open-palmed against Kakuzu's chest instead. A thump of contact, gentle and irritatingly familiar. Like they're part of the same team. Shinobi raised in the same village, trained together from childhood. "Feel? I don't know. What kind of question is that?" he pauses. Meanders past Kakuzu, faces the field full of death and smoke and crows. "Many of those people were my people," he says. His voice is grim, now. The crackle of laughter dampened down to a smolder, bitter barbs, more angry than amused. "Were," he emphasizes.

And they were all yours, once, Kakuzu thinks, but does not say. Before you were a traitor.

The man gestures dramatically towards the woods. Kakuzu watches him, silent, unjudging (for the most part). He sells his loyalty, but he's unshakeably loyal, at least until someone makes a better offer. He frankly does not have a great amount of sympathy for this man who is as fitful and restless as the fire that is his element, who goes his own way for matters of pride. He does not have enough in him to give pity to the Uchiha with his cracked-mirror eyes and jaggy tortured laugh.

He does follow, though, as Madara storms towards the trees. He is Uchiha to his bone. Reasonable, as this man is Uchiha - he began them. The modern idea of their clan. Fast, hawkish killers. What they are.

"He's over there somewhere," Madara says. His lips draw up in a grimace that's also a smile, and the skin around his eyes wrinkles, like that of an old, old man's. "I saw him fall, you know. The trees all moving around him, and then he fell. Hah!"

Kakuzu says nothing. Madara turns back towards him, eyes glitzing, gleaming. "You want to find the body?"  
It's not really a question, of course. Madara waits for an answer as though it were. And if Kakuzu refused to search, perhaps the man would refrain from the task as well, but he doubts it. Not like there's any reasonable objects he feels like making, anyway. It's a wise enough suggestion, to find the lord they spent the night fighting down, whose people lie burned and torn--crow food--and make certain he is well and truly killed. "Lead," he says, at last. The tomoe seal in the Uchiha's floret eyes twitches. "I'll follow you."

The seals twitch again. Black jags slipping over red irises, turning like blades and gears in a machine--organic, though. His eyes are bloodshot from smoke and fatigue. Red is cracked in fierce teartracks down his cheeks, though most of that has been scrubbed off in the river. The light shines wetly from the lord Uchiha's tired, excited gaze. He's thinking something. He is thinking, Kakuzu knows, of being followed. And all that being followed means--what it has meant in his past, what it is to him now. Kakuzu doesn't use many words--but when he does use them, he selects them for the best double meanings, the absolutely most amusing effects. The offer was meant both to soothe and disturb Madara. He's glad that it has.

"Good," the man says, at length. "Come, then."

They trek together under the forest canopy, thrashing through thickets. No little beasts or birds surge ahead of them - they're long since cleared out, run to make way for the battleground. Clever little things, Kakuzu thinks, cleverer than man, who runs headlong into the teeth of the gale. His leader (of the moment) leads, leaves ruffle in the breeze, Kakuzu follows Madara's footsteps. All is as it should be.

"Oh, Hashirama," Madara calls into the woods, a cracked and cackling edge to his voice. "Oh, Hashirama, my dear friend. Are you in here somewhere?"

There is no answer, of course. Just the ringing, uncanny silence of the woods, and Kakuzu's slowly-released sigh.

"He is around here somewhere." Madara turns upon him, eyes bright. "Ahh, I should feel for him, shouldn't I? Perhaps he'd have a bit of chakra left. We'll sniff him out, shall we? We'll find him."

Hashirama would have chakra still, if he lives. Perhaps only as much as a marmot or a wood grouse, but he would. As there are no marmots or wood grouses here to confuse matters, the chances are even better.

As they go further into the woods, signs of battle become evident. Wood is twisted in strange ways, contorted at Hashirama's command. Trees are downed, fallen, scorched black along their sides, missing all their leaves. It is difficult to say which of the two combatants must have drawn the other in this direction. It is a thing Hashirama would do, trying to draw Madara away from the main drama of the battlefield, reduce the casualties fallen at the hands of a former friend. But Madara would probably want to fight this old enemy-friend-rival in private himself. Kakuzu does not ask, and it is difficult to say.

"Do you know, I hate trees?" Madara asks. He's light on his feet, stepping over twisted roots and dips in the ground as he makes his way forward. Kakuzu follows. There are pockets of chakra--sad flickering things--all through this wood. Trapped energy. Ghosts, wisps. A few small animals in hiding, here and there. Other things. "I hate trees," Madara goes on. He snaps a branch from a scorched sapling as the pass and breaks it up into blackened chunks. "I had a lung almost pulled out once by a tree. I've been grabbed by trees. They're strong."

He scuffs his toe down into the dirt and kicks up ash and soil. "But they burn."

Kakuzu hums a short acknowdgement. There's something ahead of them. A flick, a rise and ebb of chakra. Small, and shrinking. But there.

"Ahaaa," Madara sighs, his pinwheel eyes speeding up in their rotation. His palms are black, smeared with charcoal, and when he wipes his face the good work he did cleaning himself in the river is undone and a black smear marks him from the corner of his mouth to his forehead. "Hashirama! Make a noise, man! If we know you're out there we can find you!"

Kakuzu did not dislike the leader of the leaf. He did not love him with the obsessive fervency Madara did, and so that love could not turn to virulent, purulent hatred in Madara's manner either. But still, he does find this cruel, in a way, and while he's never disapproved of well-applied cruelty... this might simply be unnecessary.

"Hashirama!" Madara's voice sings high and cracks. He is laughing, raging, on the edge of weeping, his grin stretched painfully tight. "Oh, my friend! Could we have one last parley? Could I impose upon you for that?"

Some, Kakuzu thinks, could well ask to die in peace.

Madara moves through the woods like an animal, not a man. He’s fast and agile. He squeezes himself between the trunks and under the great knotted roots of the trees. At times he makes his way upward, or along the undersides of branches, walking as lightly and naturally upside down or sideways as he would upon the ground. Kakuzu doesn’t leave the forest floor, but he keeps a steady pace. As Madara speeds up and then slows back down, circles, pauses to investigate darkened hollows, and then speeds up again, Kakuzu is always an equal distance from him. Shadowing his leader without comment or complaint. Waiting to find what they’re sure to find, soon—he can feel it, that chakra, shuddering strong and then faint again like a breath.

Sure enough. Madara freezes and then darts forward, into the dark between two trunks, and there is the sound of scuffling and then the excited bark of the man’s laughter. Kakuzu follows him. It’s a tighter fit for him, between the trees. It wouldn’t be if he undid the seams of his flesh and felt his way forward in his own true form. But as he is, pretending to be human, he has to turn sideways and pull his way forward with an effort, where Madara had simply slunk through the gap like a cat.

And there they are. Enclosed in what is not quite a clearing—more of a grotto. A place that’s soft and silent, dark green and damp. Kakuzu stops to watch. He disapproves of this, he realizes. It’s uncommon for him to be surprised by his own thoughts or emotions. But. Hashirama is on the ground, back half propped against the trunk of one of his great trees, one hand down on the black bloody mess of a wound at the center of his body. Madara is crouched before him. Madara is talking.

“My beautiful friend,” his whisper has a manic edge to it, a raspy regret. Joy and pain and malice. “Oh, Hashirama. You’re dying, dying. I won. You have no idea how much I’m going to miss you.”

He reaches forward and puts his hands on either side of the man’s face. Runs pale, bloody fingers through the thick brown hair. Hashirama doesn’t look at him.

Kakuzu might be able to save the man, he thinks. Give time, and if Hashirama were given blood. But he won't unless Madara commands him to, and this shattered, cracked lord of Uchiha won't tell him to do any such thing. Madara has worked a long time to get Hashirama to this place, after all, and even if it pains him now, he won't turn back.

Madara has never known what's best for him in the long run, after all. It's better to stay entirely out of his notice, entirely unremarkable. Those who catch his attention end up like this. Coughing up their heart's blood while Madara presses against them and pushes dark, laughing, agonized, mothering, close-mouthed little kisses against the crowns of their heads, against their brows.

Kakuzu doesn't get tired much, these days. Too old and too strong for that. Even so, he's just biding his time until they're out of here. This is not a good place for either of them to stay, and the kindest thing - the kindest, would be to deliver Hashirama a swift and decisive death. The slow business is doing no one any good in the long run.

He refrains from expressing this opinion, of course. Madara probably knows his thoughts well enough, and is simply ignoring them. Kakuzu puts his head back to study the smoke-choked sky and the sour, bloody light filtering down to them instead. He wonders how many years it will be before this forest is green and lush again; if they'll ever return to see it.

Hashirama grunts and coughs wetly. Kakuzu looks back at him, at Madara and him, to where Madara is pulling him closer, crooning, nonsensical and wordless, and with Hashirama moving against him without any indication of plan or conscious thought. Madara is such a child sometimes; Kakuzu thinks it with resignation, with a certain controllable sense of irritation. The man has enough years upon him that - well, it's pointless to tell him to chance his nature. But this is becoming truly distasteful, something that he doesn't care to witness or be part of. Hashirama is pitiable and much reduced, as most great men are, at death. It is a slow death, too, and that's the nature of a slow decline. It's less dignified, more pathetic.

He moves silently across the mossed ground. Madara's garnet-red floret gaze jerks in his direction when he crouches next to them. Kakuzu doesn't reach out to touch him. He merely crouches, with his elbows resting on his knees, watching them.

“Here’s Kakuzu,” the man says, still murmuring to Hashirama. “Here with me. Kakuzu… what is it? Do you want to touch him?”

The two of them are lying close as lovers. Close as they ever must have been in battle, locked together with branches and flame crackling around them. Madara’s eyes stay on Kakuzu for a moment before jerking back to Hashirama, when Hashirama suddenly tenses. The man moves like he’s trying to sit up straighter, grunting and baring his teeth in pain. Blood runs fresh from the hole in his armor. For just a moment, the man’s eyes meet Kakuzu’s own. They’re color of a stag’s. Dark enough to almost be black. There’s no accusation in his gaze. No anger or panic. Just exhaustion and pain, and a sadness beyond sadness. Something so sorrowful it almost burns. Kakuzu doesn’t think himself capable of that kind of feeling—it exists outside of him, somehow. It’s entirely human. Both wonderous and pitiful.

Madara catches it, too. Madara hisses, as if appalled. Or jealous of Hashirama’s attention—the last moment’s of his attention—being spent on anyone but him. But for all of the lord Uchiha’s instabilities, he’s intelligent. Perhaps the most intelligent man that Kakuzu has ever met. The intellect hides beneath the wildness, the madness, but it’s there. And it rises to the surface, sometimes, and leaves Madara still for a moment. Utterly calm, utterly sane. Deadly and calculating and patient. For just a moment, now, he becomes that way. And maybe because it’s the way he is when he fights, it drags Hashirama’s notice to him. And for the first time since they found the man, he looks at Madara. Really looks at him.

“I’ve always hated your eyes,” Madara whispers.

“I hate how you lie,” Hashirama answers him, voice choked, and small as the rustle of a leaf.

“I don't lie,” Madara lies, and bends forward. Hashirama closes his eyes and frowns as his enemy kisses the lids, then brushes parted lips down one cheek, down and down like what he’s going to do next is lick the blood, but he mouths back up to the eyes. His lucid moment seems overwith. “Kakuzu,” he says. “I think we need to find a stick… Yes? Ahah… ah… hhh.”

“Madara,” Kakuzu, finally, reaches out and puts his hand firmly down on Madara’s shoulder.

Madara jerks away from being touched by him. Hashirama falls backwards into the soft ground, grunting and choking anew, his face twisted and aged with agony, like a burl of wood. He is spitting out little almost-nonexistent noises that might be swallowed curses. Madara actually ignores him, his hands snapping out to grasp Kakuzu, one on one shoulder, the other at the triangle of muscle between neck and shoulder. Kakuzu ignores it, makes no other move. Hashirama's slow, uneven movement is the only motion there is.

"Madara," Kakuzu repeats, and the man's lips curl away from his teeth, his gaze lashes this way and that, repressed, furious. A bit mad, he's easier to channel, and Kakuzu allows his sudden, alarming surge closer to happen. He's not worried, exactly, that he'll die at Madara's hands. He'd rather not have a fight between the two of them. It would be long and ugly, taxing for them both. But he doesn't think he'd lose, and if Madara attacks him, he'll get the fight he wants.

There's a long moment where this sudden thing between them could go either way. Like a coin balanced on it's edge. But perhaps some part of Madara knows that he'd only make himself more miserable in the end, going the one way - perhaps this is a moment more like a droplet of water clinging to the end of a blade of grass.

"Oh," Madara says, all quavering, theatric and sincere. "Ohhh, Kakuzu." And he's coming at him then, long, bony fingers twisting in Kakuzu's shirt, pulling him close, Madara's thick spiky hair tickling under his chin. All quivering like the world's most deadly newborn fawn. Kakuzu knows better than to take it for vulnerability. He's laughing, or something like it. But he puts one hand carefully at Madara's side and one at his back, anyway.

The man’s palms are slick with Hashirama’s blood. His hair is kinked with his own, and with dried mud and grit. He smells of smoke. And, quaking and purring against Kakuzu, he seems again like what he was when the three of them first started working together—a powerful, volatile young man. No more than that. Not willing to give up enough humanity to become more than that.

But that was years ago. And the thing that gently digs black-stained fingernails in against Kakuzu’s shirt and bites the brown exposed skin at his collarbone is not entirely human anymore.

Madara mewls against Kakuzu’s. Growls and claws, and presses closer to him. “We could fuck him,” he suggests, red pinwheel eyes bright and eager. He looks almost horrified by his own suggestion, but not quite. “We could fuck him while he dies.”

“Why?” Kakuzu gives no passion to his response, one way or the other. He drags Madara closer to him, then presses him down so that his knees buckle and then bend. The two of them sit on the ground together, tense—oh so close to gasping, dying Hashirama. Their unfortunate friend.

"Because," Madara nearly sings, and seems to stop there, nuzzling at Kakuzu's throat. Kakuzu feels the hot wet press of tongue, the slide of teeth; his own heart feels steady, as immovable as a stone. He works lazily at the ties of Madara's pants. He is not in any kind of hurry. They have all the time in the world, never mind Hashirama, now with very little, perhaps grateful to be left to his own last fever dreams and death rattles. "Because," Madara says again. "Because," as Kakuzu pulls him closer so they're sitting in a bloody, filthy tangle, his eyes enormous and dark. "Because he deserves it."

Whatever that means, if it means anything at all. Curse or benediction. Kakuzu doesn't have much faith in either, and Hashirama will soon be beyond them both.

Still, it would be distasteful, to fuck a man in such a state. A man that Kakuzu honestly used to rather like. He would do it if Madara ordered him to do it, of course. But Madara needn't give the order - he has an alternative right here.

The man pulls Kakuzu close like he's planning to strangle him. Kakuzu allows himself to be kissed and even opens his mouth a little. "Make some fucking noise," Madara hisses against his cheek, after he bites Kakuzu's lip a little too hard and Kakuzu fails to demonstrate any reaction but stilling in his own telltale way. "Make some noise of fucking - " and Madara laughs, then gasps, tearing at Kakuzu's shirt with little care to seams and stitches. It's irritating. Kakuzu doesn't dislike this shirt. But some sacrifices must be made in the name of duty.

Teeth find his lip again and tug. Madara touches his dark, quick tongue against Kakuzu’s teeth. He draws back slightly and licks the seam of Kakuzu’s cheek, prodding like he wants to penetrate between the stitches. It doesn’t work that way—Kakuzu holds himself together too well. But he turns his head just enough to push his mouth back against Madara’s, meeting that invasive tongue with a coil of black thread. The man’s fingertips dig at the jagged patchwork surface of his chest, and here again Kakuzu parts a few seams just enough to let slick cords free to wrap around pale wrists.

Madara lies to himself and everyone he knows—Kakuzu doesn’t. Kakuzu is almost always honest, in thought and action. And honestly, he likes the look of disgust that he gets from his employer. Not normal disgust, but a sort of excited revulsion. Madara looks unnerved. And he looks like he’s enjoying this.

And he’s good at the game, too. Not because of experience, though he has that, but because he’s clever and dangerously brave. With his sharp teeth, he pays attention to the stitches, rather than Kakuzu’s dark skin. He whispers obscene little sing-song notes against the sensitive places where the flesh is sewn together. He finds the seams that Kakuzu has let open and presses his face against them, into the black tentacles inside, licking and nuzzling at them, wicked grinning mouth not so very far from the place where Kakuzu keeps his hearts, and that—yes. That feels good.

Kakuzu strokes a hand up and down Madara’s spine. He finds the piercings in his ears and rolls them between his fingers. Traces the line of the man’s pulse down his neck, pinches and scrapes his dark nipples and pulls black cord down the edges of his scars. Madara jerks, laughs, and slides down to shamelessly prop himself on his elbows. One strong, nimble hand slides up along the inside of Kakuzu’s thigh, digging against the muscle. Madara passes his cheek after it, like a cat. And this, too, is not an unpleasant sensation.

Hashirama coughs, wet and low. He's not even ten feet away. Madara stills for a moment, doesn't exactly glance in his direction, but Kakuzu can guess at the flicker of red eyes going the dying man's way.

He slides his hand down into Madara's hair, tangles the gritty strands around his fingers. Madara likes to be hurt, sometimes. Not lasting, not permanent, but he likes it; it drives him to a frenzy. This time, Kakuzu doesn't yank, he just pulls, persistent, not exactly gentle, demanding his leader's attention. And after a moment, Madara does turn slowly back to him.  
After another moment, he grins. Kakuzu relaxes a little then, not entirely, but enough that he'll let his head drop back, give the appearance of relaxed compliance while Madara works at his pants and snarls to himself before baring Kakuzu to the air. Madara takes Kakuzu's cock into his mouth without hesitation. Madara likes doing this to people, Kakuzu knows. He enjoys being on that end of things. His mouth is hot and he works Kakuzu skillfully with his tongue, coaxing him harder, hotter. Kakuzu closes his eyes and opens them, turning his head, allowing the human parts and systems to respond to the clever mouth devoted at this moment to pleasing him.

Hashirama's breath rattles like pebbles into a pail. Ten feet away, he is farther away from them than any amount of walking could take him. His hands clench at the ground. He is taking a very long time to die, but then again, he's very strong. Madara would probably say something along the lines that he deserved a death like this. A brave, noble man, with a chance to feel pain and terror sweeping through him like a tide.

Madara takes Kakuzu deep into his mouth and hums. A series of low, wordless notes. A delicious, wet vibration that ignites nerve endings up into Kakuzu’s belly and along the base of his spine. Makes him stir, harder, and draw in a single slow breath. Madara’s mouth draws back. He makes a circle of one finger and thumb and squeezes at the base of the shaft, bumping his hand up and down the slick flesh while he uses his teeth and flexible tongue to tease just the weeping tip. Kakuzu leans back. Reposed, for all that he can feel his muscles beginning to ease and tense and his hips beginning to ache with an easy desire.

His employer bobs down again. Sucks hard and then draws away completely, all clench of lips and gentle scrape of teeth. Beside them, Hashirama is breathing, bleeding. Dark gaze less than half focused. Madara’s attention slides over to him, again. The man’s lips are moving just barely. For a moment, Madara’s lips move too—and Kakuzu isn’t sure what it is the two of them are saying, if it’s anything at all. Part of a prayer, maybe. Part of a battle hymn, a blessing or a curse. Maybe it’s misaligned. Maybe Hashirama murmurs farewell to the world while Madara asks—what next?

But it’s impossible to tell. Kakuzu slides the ends of his dark cords along Madara’s own bloody wounds, and again the man hisses and turns back to face him. “You don’t want to?” he asks. “Not at all? We could send him whimpering into the afterlife… You don’t want that at all?”

“I’ll do what you command.”

“It isn’t the same.” Madara shakes his head.

“It never will be the same,” he says calmly, not without a chiding thought backing his even voice. That was the point of the whole exercise, wasn’t it? To change things, to move irrevocably towards the future. Perhaps not precisely what Madara meant by that simple, childish complaint, but even so, it’s the simple truth.

Madara sighs against his skin, closes his mouth around Kakuzu’s cock again, impatient sucking him off. Kakuzu closes his eyes for a moment and then opens them again, reaching to touch the crown of Madara’s head, glancing back and forth across the clearing. Madara adds a bit of teeth to the mix, which he knows Kakuzu doesn’t particularly care for, but it hardly matters, anyway – he has to pay attention, this is a battlefield after all, someone could be coming. Even if their chakra will probably betray them, probably, the less skilled of them, the less skilled ones are probably the ones who died almost immediately, he can’t afford complete distraction –

Madara hums around him, and that does it. Kakuzu comes with a released breath and the slightest jerk upwards of his hips, pushing his fingers through Madara’s tangled hair, pulling uncaringly where the coarse strands are snarled together. His employer pulls away and spits semen to the ground beside him before licking his upper lip. “You could show a little more,” he says, sounding incongruously sulky. “I do my best for you, you could make a little noise.”

Kakuzu waits a moment, and when it seems their brief tryst is over, he tucks himself back into his pants and starts doing up the ties again.

Madara gets up and edges away. Edges back to Hashirama, and lies down beside him. Kakuzu keeps an eye on the two of them, but nothing happens, really. Just quiet murmuring, and the scuff of leather against earth, and then stillness. They are chest to chest, hear to heart, each one just as bloody as the other. Hashirama is paler than the Uchiha. Solemn, faded.

"I am not your dog," Madara murmurs, and kisses Hashirama's mouth, and looks into his dark eyes until--finally--they don't look back anymore.

And that's it.

"Come," Kakuzu says, turning west toward the way out of the trees. After a moment, Madara follows.


End file.
